The Government narrative on this Bill is that it is largely a technical Bill that is going to put on a statutory footing what is already the practice in terms of eligibility criteria on residency and habitual residency for social housing. It is just technical and it is a tidying-up exercise, providing a little bit more efficiency for decisions of the RTB in the second instance. There is nothing to see here and nothing to be concerned about. That begs the question: why we are doing it? What is the rationale for this? As has been asked, why is the Minister doing it if we are not really doing much anyway, and why is there such a big rush to do it? That begs pretty serious questions. I have to ask that question in the context of what has happened up in the North this week because, sadly, I am afraid these things have become connected. We have a horrific attack taking place in Belfast, which should be utterly condemned. The perpetrator of that attack should be brought to justice. People are rightly horrified by what happened. Of course, our sympathy goes out to the victim of this terrible attack, but we have also seen how it has then resulted in horrific attacks on people who happen to be immigrants and people of colour in the North. Houses are being burnt out and vile, vicious racist attacks are taking place against people purely on the basis that they are deemed to be immigrants or people of colour who had nothing whatsoever to do with the attack. Horrific things happen all the time. As a lot of people have been highlighting, in the North we have horrific instances of violence against women where they are killed as a result of domestic violence. We have horrific instances of organised crime in this country where people are chopped up by criminals and so on. There is revulsion and horror but it does not generally lead to attacks on people who have nothing to do with that, and generalisations, but in the context of the North, it has fuelled racist pogroms against people of colour and migrants because the alleged perpetrator of that horrific assault was an immigrant. Certain political forces on the far right, who also coincidentally tend to be supporters of the Israeli regime, which I will just throw that in for good measure, who seem to get a lot of support online from the United States and Britain and so on for their targeting of immigrants and for whipping up hatred, fear and hostility and horrific, violent pogroms against immigrants. There is support from really vile political forces on the far right from those countries. How is that all connected to what we are discussing here? We have got to stand up against that. The Government, and political forces that have any sense of decency, should not in any way lean into narratives that suggest that because someone is an immigrant or a person of colour, somehow he or she is a threat or something to be feared or that he or she is a problem for our society. We must not in any way lean into a narrative that can lead to that sort of stuff. That is what the Government is doing. It is leaning into that stuff because the truth is we have a shortage of housing and a catastrophic housing crisis not because of immigrants coming into this country, but because of a Government that has failed for more than a decade to address the housing crisis and to deliver the social and affordable housing necessary to address it and to deal with the homelessness crisis that continues to escalate. The Government has leant into the narrative that somehow it is because there are too many people rather than it has not provided enough social and affordable housing or it has failed to take measures that would prevent people ending up homeless. That leads into the racist narrative being pushed by the far right, which ends in the sort of stuff we have seen in the past few weeks. There seems to be no apparent rationale for this because this is about rationing access to something there should not be a shortage of. That is essentially what this Bill is about. There should not be a shortage of housing. There should not be a shortage of social and affordable housing. There should not be homelessness, yet what this Bill is about is about rationing access to something that there should not be a shortage of because it should be a basic right. Of course, it is a handy way to deflect from the Government's own responsibility. The oldest trick in the book and in politics generally is, "Watch what my right hand is doing so you don't see what my left hand is doing." This week I tried to highlight the fact that Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown is selling off land zoned for 1,000 homes on publicly owned land to private developers. Nobody is talking about that. It is an absolute scandal. On a site that is publicly owned, where we should have 100% social and affordable housing, we are only going to get 20% social and affordable housing because the Government has decided to sell it off and somebody is going to profiteer from it. That is why we have a housing crisis. The Government is looking after people who are profiteering from the inadequate supply of the most basic thing in the world - an affordable, secure roof over one's head. Even in this Bill, it is doing things to benefit landlords and to make it ever so slightly easier, for example, to evict people. Technical problems with termination notices will not longer be a reason to stop an eviction. It will be just a little easier for landlords to evict people when they should not be allowed to evict people at all in the midst of a homelessness crisis. The Government claims that nobody is going to be excluded from social housing eligibility who was previously eligible for it but, in actuality, as multiple organisations, including Mercy Law, IHREC and so on, are saying, the Bill may well result in that. In any event, there is a performative element to it because what it is saying is there is a problem we need to tighten up on here, suggesting that people who are not eligible and do not have a right to social housing might be getting it, so we have to tighten it up. That certainly is not happening. Asylum seekers are not being housed in social housing. It is not happening but there is an implication that maybe it is and therefore we have to tighten it up. The consequence may be that vulnerable people will be excluded from emergency accommodation or even potentially from eligibility for social housing because one person in the household does not quite meet the criteria, even though everybody else has met the criteria such as children, including vulnerable children, people who are victims of human trafficking and so on may be deemed ineligible. As I understand it, the Government is going to table amendments on the next Stage, which could mean the eligibility thresholds required for social housing could then be applied to access to emergency accommodation. Where are the people who are deemed ineligible or cannot gain access to emergency accommodation going to go? They are going to end up on the streets homeless. The Government has achieved a performative act of pointing the finger at them, setting them up as somehow a problem that has to be managed, fuelling and giving ground and concessions to the sort of people who are engaging in pogroms in the North at the moment. To be honest, that is what I think the Government is up to here. I do not really see, other than that, the reasons for this legislation. I am deeply concerned about what the Government is doing. We will have more detailed questions on Committee Stage about all of this. The Minister of State did not even accept many of the recommendations put forward by the joint committee on how this legislation should be processed, which begs serious questions about what the real agenda behind it is.

Sentiment score: -0.21